I invited my political philosophy undergraduate class to attend the conversation about No Child Left Behind, and several of them came along. I told the students beforehand that it would be fun, because lots of people would be annoyed with what I had to say, and that certainly someone would accuse me of using a “deficit model” of poverty. The thing is, if you didn’t already know what the “deficit model” of poverty is, and heard the talk (which you can read here), you couldn’t discern that I was saying anything rude or insulting. So after I had spoken, I could see a couple of my students at the back puzzling at why anyone would give me a hard time. But then it came, second question, and I watched one of them open her eyes in thrilled disbelief, as if I were some sort of soothsayer. I’ll forward this link to her to apologise for giving her that impression.
How, my student may have wondered, could I have known that I would be accused of holding a deficit model of poverty?
In fact, the interrogator who raised the question did so in a very nice and friendly way, which was not what I had expected. What people usually object to is the idea that poor and disadvantaged parents lack the resources to evaluate and monitor the performance of the principals of their schools, and to articulate criticism and effectively lobby for improvement. In assuming this I am falling into the trap of the deficit model which, I take it, holds the cultural resources of poor people to be inferior to those of wealthier and better educated people.
It is hard for me to figure out what the deficit model of poverty assumes, because I’ve never come across someone who defends it, in person or in print. The first 3 pages of google results, for example, turn it up only as a derogatory phrase – it is a label you attach to your enemies rather than one that you embrace. Here’s the best definition I found (pdf, p.8):
The ‘deficit perspective’ is an approach through which scholars explain varying levels of access and opportunity (educationally, professionally, and in other spheres) among groups of people by identifying deficits in the cultures and behaviors of the underprivileged group.
But even the author of this definition cites only critics of the deficit model, not defenders of it.
It’s quite difficult to respond to the deficit model accusation because the person raising it is automatically accusing you of bad faith if you deny the model (the linked paper by Paul Gorski is basically a very long accusation of bad faith against Ruby Payne). It is a kind of “gotcha” conversational gambit, showing the speaker up as both racist (or classist, whatever that is) and insensitive to putative racism of teachers. It seems to be aimed at closing off one kind of discussion (whether the culture in question is defective), but it also closes off another (what the real explanations are for the achievement gap, beyond the putative racism and stupidity of teachers). (One audience member came up to me afterwards and criticised me for saying true things that, she thought, the undergraduates in the room should not hear because, unlike us, they are unenlightened so that their prejudices would be reinforced by these truths).
(I’m entirely unsympathetic to the assumption that all cultures are equal in quality, but can see why people are unwilling to blame background cultures for the poor performance of students. (See this nice post by Dina, at The Line, for an explanation of why discussions of culture are unfruitful). What we see are behaviours and outcomes: we want to explain, and ultimately to change, those, and if saying that culture is an intermediate explanatory factor is offensive, let’s not say it. Like Dina, “I’d like to see all of us junk any conversation that smacks of a soundbyte or a silver bullet, and talk about how we in public education might address, fruitfully, the entire nexus of influences that make up our children: individual responsibility; media; family; community; ethnicity; economics; nationality; history.”)
So, how to respond to the accusation? I noticed when Richard Rothstein visited that he takes a different tack from me. He must get accused of using the deficit model every time he speaks, and his response is to say that he is not saying anything about the quality of the culture of disadvantaged groups, but simply assuming that what we want is to narrow the achievement gap so that children from disadvantaged groups will have a better chance of competing effectively in this society, the one they will actually have to live in. (He doesn’t make that point in this Ed Leadership piece, but he does express his justified puzzlement that people accuse him of racism for pointing out that the explanation of lower achievement of black students may not lie in the behaviour of school, given that there are ample out-of-school explanations).
My tack is different, reflecting perhaps a higher level of irritation, and a more confrontational personality. I think poverty is bad for people for numerous reasons, and that one of those reasons is that it creates stresses and pressures that make it much harder for them than it would otherwise be to negotiate the social world. Middle class people are at ease around other middle class people (which teachers and school administrators are by definition), and some of them (like those with PhDs for example — if you doubt this, talk to some teachers who have dealt with professor parents) feel entitled to challenge and put in their place the people who govern the daily lives of their children in school. The dynamic is very different from that for people who had a very difficult time in school themselves, are used to taking instructions from other people in their working lives, and feel alienated and nervous when they encounter people who have more social power than they do. (I’ll write a supremely late review of Annette Lareau’s Home Advantage
The stresses that accompany poverty (for those who do not choose it, which is everyone except nuns, monks, and the odd saint) are often very demanding and sometimes overwhelming – they make it harder for people to make good long-term decisions and stick to them, sometimes because there just are no good long term options. So yes, if you like, I do think that poverty creates deficits. But then, I don’t see why we should complain about, or try to get rid of, it, unless it is because it creates deficits. If you reject the idea that poverty, or inequality, creates deficits (as, I’ve sometimes noticed, Megan McArdle does, and the people who accuse me of operating with the deficit model seem to) I just don’t see what the moral reasons are for wanting to create a more equal, poverty-free, social environment. Rather like the last Muggletonian (who, apparently, only evangelised to Jehovah’s Witnesses and other door-to-door evangelisers) , I reserve my “lefter than thou” responses for people who have already made that move themselves.
{ 61 comments }
abb1 04.23.08 at 8:00 pm
So yes, if you like, I do think that poverty creates deficits.
Not poverty, but poverty + hopelessness, the ‘no way out’ thing. Under different circumstances poverty, I think, may actually create incentives and facilitate responsible behavior.
Rich B. 04.23.08 at 8:06 pm
This post may set the CT record for largest percentage that is merely parenthetical (or merely parenthetical to the parenthetical).
I am curious, however, what your definition of “poverty” is. It seems that the “deficits” you discuss are relatively persistent well into the communities that would consider themselves “working class” or “middle class.” (The “median school” may be relatively advantaged compared to the poorest, but still has at least a wide gulf in the other direction compared to the rich suburban districts.)
In a nation in which (based on the 2000 census) only about 45% of American had at least “some college” on their resume (and less than 25% have at least a 4 year degree), doesn’t a claim that alleviating “poverty” is necessary to help parents better judge schools prove too much?
(Your comparison to the PhD parent is certainly true, but if we must raise the bottom 91% of society out of “poverty” so they can better rate their local principal, that’s quite a task. (If only the 20% that are high school dropouts, that’s still quite a task.))
James 04.23.08 at 8:10 pm
you don’t know what “classist” is? really?
marcel 04.23.08 at 8:12 pm
Thanks for the link on the Muggletonians. What a hoot, right up there with Bill Bailey and the Last Internationalists. I figured that this was some obscure Harry Potter reference (obscure to me anyway, since I’ve not read any of the books — yet. I’m waiting for them to come out in comic books). As always, truth is stranger than fiction!
asarwate 04.23.08 at 8:30 pm
I think the real problem with making arguments about “quality” assements of “culture” is that it essentializes “cultural attittudes” toward education. Unless you can back it up with statistical evidence (“70% of parents of ethnic group X think that their children are better off working a job than studying in high school”) you’re just sidelining the discussion of what we should do in favor of a blame game.
Henry 04.23.08 at 8:33 pm
Didn’t E.P. Thompson claim that _he_ was a rump Muggletonian at some point??? (don’t want a trivial issue to clog up the discussion of a very good post, but since Thompson died in the early 1990s, if he qualified as a Muggletonian of sorts, he surely was the last of em, and his evangelism was a lot more broadly aimed).
R 04.23.08 at 9:33 pm
It seems to be aimed at closing off one kind of discussion (whether the culture in question is defective), but it also closes off another (what the real explanations are for the achievement gap, beyond the putative racism and stupidity of teachers).
The unwillingness to discuss whether the culture is defective is the left-wing line of attack.
But there’s a right-wing line of attack as well, which downplays importance of overall societal racism, or any social factor other than schooling, and focuses only on the presumed the racism of teachers and schools. In its extreme form, this view holds that low achievement is caused *only* by the racism and the “soft bigotry of low expectations” in schools, and low achievement is the cause of poverty. The only responsibility the rest of us have for closing the achievement gap is to insist that teachers be “held accountable.”
Its a very convenient argument for a conservative — you don’t need to worry about discrimination, heathcare, high incarceration rates or a history of Jim Crow. The root of racial disparity lies with the low expectations teachers (who just happen to be highly unionized, mostly female, and not significant contributers to conservative causes).
robertdfeinman 04.23.08 at 9:50 pm
Let’s assume that poor parents are lacking in some resource which makes them less effective in pushing for their child’s interests in school as are less poor parents.
You can chose any cause you wish for this – cultural, economic, lack of education, lack of a belief that education is important, etc.
There are a few facts which needed to be considered, however, when this type of argument is used.
1. Poor students tend to go to poor schools. That is, they are less well equipped, the teachers are less well paid and, perhaps, less well trained and, most important, less well funded.
2. When poor students are mixed into better schools they do better. Apparently the cultural deficits of their parents can be at least partially compensated for when the schools have enough resources and money.
This is another case of blame the victim, made all the more nefarious because there is a grain of truth in it. Poor parents tend to be less involved in their children’s education.
Society has decided that devoting the resources to education the lowest classes is not worth it. The results reflect this choice.
SamChevre 04.23.08 at 9:56 pm
I have only a couple minutes, so this will be less complete than I’d prefer.
I think that different cultures can value different things and that is OK; many measures of academic achievement assume that everyone should (for example) value going to college, which tends to show any culture that highly values the trades as low-achieving and inferior. (As mine is one of those trades-valuing cultures, I notice this often.)
abb1 04.23.08 at 10:09 pm
I don’t understand what exactly the controversy is here. Culture is, obviously, a product of the environment, a way to adopt to the environment. If environment is seriously unhealthy, due to racism, poverty, or even, for that matter, by unearned privilege – then, obviously, the culture is likely to be fucked up too. Is this supposed to be controversial? It can be observed empirically all over the place.
DC 04.23.08 at 10:33 pm
Yeah, I don’t get it – I mean, why not just embrace “the deficit model”?
And I count 16 parentheses, two of which were inside other parentheses.
harry b 04.23.08 at 10:38 pm
rich b — I’m almost certain that I’ve exceeded the percentage of parenthetical comments displayed here in previous posts. (Actually, re-reading it, maybe not. (But I’m not sure)).
I’d define poverty the standard way — household income at some percentage (half) of the median. But disadvantage is complex, and a kid growing up in a household with income at level X but with both parents in the house and a mixed-income neighbourhood is in a very different situation from one growing up in a neighbourhood with a high concentration of poverty. Yes, of course the PhD example was a bit over the top. I didn’t quite understand your third paragraph.
I assume Rowling took the name Muggles from the Muggletonians (I noticed the other day that she stole something from Molesworth too, but I forget what it was). I’m almost sure that Thompson wrote the article about Noakes (the last Muggletonian) from which I got the nugget that Noakes would, when the JWs came round, tell his wife and kids to clear out and then evangelise them. (I think that after he died his wife called Thompson, somehow knowing of his interest, to get him to look at the papers). But I read the article 25 years ago, while procrastinating the writing of an undergraduate philosophy essay, so I have no record of it….
Helen 04.23.08 at 10:46 pm
he is not saying anything about the quality of the culture of disadvantaged groups, but simply assuming that what we want is to narrow the achievement gap so that children from disadvantaged groups will have a better chance of competing effectively in this society, the one they will actually have to live in.
This is the kind of thing that makes relatively uneducated (university, but no PhD) people like me go “Duh!!”
Also, what ABB1 said in #11.
Roy Belmont 04.23.08 at 11:01 pm
“what the moral reasons are for wanting to create a more equal, poverty-free, social environment”
It’s health. Healthy bodies respond more optimally to environmental challenges.
The conservative, tacitly racist/classist p.o.v. is that the lower classes are like dead wood, or dead skin, or phlegm or something. To be jettisoned, or given social roles suitable to their inferior nature. All Darwinian and all.
In that light there’s a deficit to the dominant culture in carrying the weight of non-productive tissue. Some is natural and necessary, too much is detrimental.
Poverty doesn’t create immediate deficits in those who aren’t poor, so who cares if there’s a deficit inherent in poverty?
The present system actually requires a large amount of poverty to function.
The rebuttal to the Darwinian question is adaptability. Diversity is a clear mark of ecological health.
The arrogance of status quo culture has lost most of its foundations – material increase, with all its attendant glories, has hit the wall – and becomes increasingly fictive. The well-springs of human adaptability aren’t in any way exclusive to the current beneficiaries of things as they are. Far from it.
That in Dina-at-the-Line’s phrase “the socioeconomic deprivation, the ghettos, the pervasive violence, the discrimination” are pervasive enough to be called “culture” is obviously true but maybe not as accurate as that these things exist as a tension between accommodation and resistance. To survive materially you have to accept it, to keep your soul alive you have to reject it.
“School is not cool” may be a common attitude there, understandably, but everybody gets schooled, one way or another. Toward what end? Preservation of the status quo is no longer a tenable goal.
salient downs 04.24.08 at 12:54 am
It’s health. Healthy bodies respond more optimally to environmental challenges.
That seems to be acknowledging a deficit suffered by people in poverty, and falls directly into the “deficit model” of thinking. Of course, claiming that folks in poverty disproportionately suffer from a variety of diseases (due to lack of resources / treatment options) is entirely reasonable (though unfortunate). That’s one of several reasons many of us are scratching our heads about why the “deficit model” is considered so inappropriate.
(Much of the rest of your comment, by the way, fell off a very deep cliff and is not intelligible from this distance.)
(And yes, I am deliberately trying to increase my parentheticality in order to better fit in (truly, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (except when it ventures into parody (which this does not (I hope))))).
harry b 04.24.08 at 1:16 am
helen — you might otherwise have concluded that having qualifications beyond college are a very poor indication of how well educated one is… (actually, I think that Rothstein shares your educational advantage of not having a PhD.)
SG 04.24.08 at 1:27 am
Harry, the criticisms of the deficit model you mention here seem to be built around the idea that the deficit model is the only explanation of differences in achievement (this is what I infer from Dina’s criticism of the “silver bullet” approach to the problem). This seems a very shallow criticism of any model.
I think that poor communities’ cultural deficits in regard to educational attainment are obvious and I don’t think that any attempts by left-wing activists (or educators) to ignore them is particularly helpful.
Failure to attend to these deficits is, I think, some of the explanation for the failure of genuinely progressive education systems (like Australia’s in the 70s and 80s) to bring about a proper levelling of educational attainment across classes.
Geoff Robinson 04.24.08 at 2:36 am
Isn’t Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour worth revisiting here?
Witt 04.24.08 at 2:37 am
why the “deficit model†is considered so inappropriate
Because every time I hear someone use this explanation without caveats, it leads directly to the racist conclusion,”We can’t do anything to fix them, so why waste the time/money?”
I don’t doubt that there are ways to talk about deficits without immediately progressing to the idea that deficits are expensive and impossible to truly fix — we have examples of Henry’s (and others’) thoughtfulness right here in this thread. But in the real-life discussions that I’ve had on this topic, racism is nearly always the driving factor. And it’s usually not hidden.
So I would imagine that’s why folks get defensive — because if you’re really trying to use acknowledgment of deficits as a starting point for talking about how to fix them, it’s horrifying to think that you’re going to get lumped in with the folks who say “Why are we pouring so much money into inner-city schools? They’re just going to shoot each other anyway.”
Patrick 04.24.08 at 3:11 am
One of the deficits is time. Parents who work multiple jobs with inflexible schedules don’t have as much time to go to parent/teacher conferences, volunteer in the classroom, serve on the board of the after-school program, research the behavioral diagosis in vogue this year and on and on and on. Meanwhile PhD faculty members (like me, for example) can arrange their schedules so they can volunteer in their kids classrooms every Friday morning from kindergarden until the teachers decide the kids are too old for that kind of parental involvement. And we have the time to research the drugs that may be suggested and to take our kid to the educational specialists. (This is quite apart from our comparatively generous insurance benefits.)
The time deficit is especially acute for single parents.
All that’s got little to do with the relative merits of one culture or another, except, I suppose, it points to a failure of understanding in the dominant culture.
Roy Belmont 04.24.08 at 3:53 am
#15-
Well no, not even that.
Health of the species, not health issues.
Human health. Healthy society, responding to severe life-threatening challenges. Many of them, one right after the other, sometimes a lot of them all at once. Coming soon to a venue near you.
Ecological diversity=healthier environment. Meaning it responds more resiliently to sudden fluctuations.
Population diversity=healthier humanity.
Same-same only with people. Health in that context being an ability to respond to the aforementioned looming challenges, which, bourgeois wishful thinking to the contrary, are right around the corner.
The resilience of the human race is being squandered the same way agriculture’s squandering its own legacy.
Monoculture would be a nice sort of punning way to describe it.
The lib-simp version of caring about the disadvantaged is because it’s nicer to do that. I’m suggesting it may be vital to our survival.
Clearly the status quo is not capable of delivering on its promises of a better future. Or even a sustainable one.
engels 04.24.08 at 4:24 am
Poverty destroys all natural human relations, clouds the mind and cripples the human spirit. Being middle class does the same thing.
Dave 04.24.08 at 7:50 am
@22: from which we conclude, naturally, that only the rich are fit to live….. ;-))
[Given, I take it, there is No Such Thing as a working-class American any more…]
Tracy W 04.24.08 at 8:46 am
Just to go off on my own little hobbyhorse. :)
Comment 8:
I agree that poor students can do better if the schools are better. It’s just important to be clear that “better schools” does not mean “schools that have a lot of kids from rich backgrounds”. “Better schools” means a whole cluster of things, such as a well-developed field-tested curriculum, school staff who believe they can make a difference, frequent use of formative assessment (that’s the sort where you test the kid and adjust the next lessons based on the results of the test), a school administration that supports teachers, etc.
Also, more money can easily be wasted away with no measurable effect on children’s outcomes.
7
And sadly, anyone who argues that many schools can do better with the kids they already have, is accused of making this argument. I speak from experience.
Tracy W 04.24.08 at 8:56 am
I’ve just re-read the post above, and an wondering about this. Even talking about the entire nexuses of influences seems a massive task, at least if we read “talk about” as “talk about in an informed manner”. I mean, history and economics are subjects that people devote their entire lives to learning more about. People can also devote their entire lives to studying one ethnic group – and I know that I have read writings by members of my own ethnic group about what it is like to be one of us that I totally disagreed with. Teaching techniques and curriculum design, though not on your list are another set of topics that we can discuss our entire lives. I think to talk fruitfully, we need to narrow the conversation somehow.
chris armstrong 04.24.08 at 9:30 am
Well, life under New Labour has left me feeling that the deficit model, as you call it, is alive and well. Wave a magic wand over poverty of resources and, hey presto! you get poverty of aspiration. Brown and Blair seem to work just the same spell. Is this what we used to call ‘(the myth of) cultural deprivation’, by the way? It may be less prevalent in philosophical circles, which would be more to the good (though I certainly remember Richard Arneson writing about the ‘choice-making deficits’ of the poor).
And seconding James, you’re not sure what classism means??? When I first went to (a very middle class) university, certain other students used to laugh when I answered a question, I THINK purely because someone with a working class accent used a long word. Would that count?
freshlysqueezedcynic 04.24.08 at 11:17 am
It’s funny, and somewhat tangential, but this talk of the deficit model, and why no-one seems to want to use it reminds me in an odd way of this post that Dsquared made a while back which made a similar point to that coming from some of the comments on the subject of why left-wingers do sometimes soft-pedal movements based around criticism of repressive Third World regimes; they’re afraid that these criticisms might get co-opted by people with a different cluster-bomb to grind. This seems to be a fairly reasonable and somewhat justified response, but it’s not a particularly helpful one if you’re trying to build said movement.
Is our fear of giving an unnecessary platform to racists (or, indeed, Decents) hindering the real work that could be done to investigate the interactions between poverty, culture and educational achievement? And, more importantly, is this a feature in left discourse which can be removed or lessened in some way to facilitate this kind of work, or is it an ingrained obstacle/necessary barrier which could only be eradicated by the eradication of racism in itself – a goal probably so long-term as to be de facto impractible?
harry b 04.24.08 at 11:25 am
chris and james — define classism for me. Is it class-based prejudice? (That’s what chris suggests). I don’t mean I don’t recognise a phenomenon — I mean that I’ve never heard it defined. In addition, I have a strong prejudice against it being lumped in with other bad isms because, well, capitalism (anbd hence class) is the fundamental problem, isn’t it?
magistra 04.24.08 at 12:26 pm
Is our fear of giving an unnecessary platform to racists (or, indeed, Decents) hindering the real work that could be done to investigate the interactions between poverty, culture and educational achievement?
There are people who are studying such topics: I came across Diane Reay recently (not being an educational specialist myself, there may be many others as well).
I suspect the difficulty is how you translate these academic studies into policies/practices without them being reduced to meaningless slogans/initiatives (like the ‘all children should get X hours of culture’ per week).
Dan S. 04.24.08 at 12:31 pm
“ Middle class people are at ease around other middle class people (which teachers and school administrators are by definition), and some of them . . feel entitled to challenge and put in their place the people who govern the daily lives of their children in school. The dynamic is very different from that for people who had a very difficult time in school themselves, are used to taking instructions from other people in their working lives, and feel alienated and nervous when they encounter people who have more social power than they do . . .”
Hey, you should read Annet –
“(I’ll write a supremely late review of Annette Lareau’s Home Advantage (UK), later . . .”
Oh. Ok. – I’d also suggest her Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Very, very good.
I do think that deficit-model criticisms (if not deficit-model-baiting) can have a role to play in helping refocus people’s attentions towards cultural differences, the consequences of power relations, etc. The more one thinks of some students’ lives as merely a lack, the less able one is to draw on class/culture-specific experiences, competencies, strengths, etc. in instruction – something which is generally automatic for middle+class/culture kids. See for example Classroom Diversity: Connecting Curriculum to Student’s Lives, Heath’s classic Ways with Words, this little online article by Au about culturally responsive literacy instruction, etc., etc.
Similarly, the more one thinks of some students’ lives as simply a lack, the less able one is to provide appropriate help to kids and families. For example, ‘read to your child’ is pretty much never bad advice, but it can be woefully incomplete, missing how the practice of bedtime stories is actually embedded in and supported by some very specific contexts, attitudes, and skills.
It’s also going to be hard to appreciate the depth and influence of values, however maladaptive they might be in terms of mainstream educational success . . .
Etc. Of course, one can go overboard.
—-
I’d also want to make a distinction between the effects and circumstances of poverty/lower-working class life – from multiple stressors, having to work two jobs or spend half the day traveling on underfunded public transit, to lack of bankable social or cultural capital – and specific aspects of poor/working class culture – learned multigenerational patterns of adaptive responses (often) to said conditions. Or something like that. A bit like abb1’s #11.
Where did preview go?
Matt McIrvin 04.24.08 at 12:42 pm
Poverty destroys all natural human relations, clouds the mind and cripples the human spirit. Being middle class does the same thing.
Yesterday my wife and I saw a car with a bunch of bumper stickers all over the back expressing generally liberal and leftist sentiments, one of which was “The middle class is a freakshow”. I’m not sure that isn’t really a right-wing sentiment, though; if you’re anti-middle-class, presumably you want to eliminate the middle class, so you ought to be perfectly happy with the way things are going in the US.
Rich B. 04.24.08 at 12:50 pm
Yes, of course the PhD example was a bit over the top. I didn’t quite understand your third paragraph.
The point of the third paragraph is that only 9% of Americans have graduate degrees (and 20% are high school dropouts (and another 35% have a high school diploma and no college)).
So, the 15% of the population (approximately) that is in “poverty” maps only imperfectly to the percent that has a “deficit” when in comes to supervising schools (and that “deficit” could be applied — based on your definition — to the 55% with no college at all, or the 91% without a graduate degree, or (less realistically) to only the 20% who are high school dropouts).
My point is, even if you succeed in defeating poverty (everyone earning less now magically earns 80% of the current median), you will still be left with the “deficit” in school supervision experienced by current individuals who make 80% of the median — which strikes me as still a pretty sizable deficit.
It is like claiming that “fighting poverty” will stop the problem of insufficient broadband access in America. To a point, yes, but there are tons of people who earn well, well above the poverty line (or even above the median) who cannot afford (or do not value) broadband.
I think you are underestimating the “deficit” suffered by the median (white, middle class, middle America, whatever) America.
Mold 04.24.08 at 1:08 pm
Elitist claptrap. Within our school district, the poor can make their case very well, thank you. In fact, many of the students have items in their folders from the expressed wishes of poor and uneducated parents.
The wealthier tend to focus on the student as the agent of change. The poor seem to blame the instructor as the cause.
I posit that the opportunities visible to the student are what drives the differences. Anecdotally, I was in a rural school that was graduating farmers and field hands. The academics reflected this. Then, a move placed me in a wealthy suburban school. For the first time, I did not have to slow down for anyone and I was pleased to work at my own pace.
We don’t ask our professional atheletes to perform at middle school level, why should the academics be forced to?
engels 04.24.08 at 1:09 pm
Wow, I expected to get some dumb responses to the comment above, but I didn’t expect them to be that bad.
robertdfeinman 04.24.08 at 1:46 pm
I wonder how many offering great insights and analysis in these sorts of discussions have any actual experience in the classroom?
When the parents of a seriously troubled student refuse to come to school to discuss options for their child who is to blame? When they do come to school and are told that their child needs professional help and then don’t seek it, who is to blame?
The way NCLB is set up this student will drag down the performance of the school and the school will be seen as at fault.
When poor districts get a much higher proportion of recent immigrants who can’t speak English than wealthier districts, and are then required to push them into regular classes before they are ready, and they do poorly on the standardized tests, who is to blame. This is another of the NCLB policies. Once again the school is the fall guy.
Very few immigrants can afford to move into wealthy districts so poor areas have to bear the brunt, yet the funding for the schools seldom takes this into account since it is based upon real estate values.
If you want a better educated populace, then pay for it.
chris armstrong 04.24.08 at 2:29 pm
Harry, by classism I do simply mean something like class-based prejudice. But I think it’s an important phenomenon that gets sidelined sometimes. When a given disadvantaged kid fails to achieve x educationally, I think there’s a tendency to look to resource differences, biased selection procedures etc etc at the risk of forgetting (a fairly pervasive, but obviously not universal) simple distrust or dislike of people from working class backgrounds. It may be epiphenomenal on capitalism, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important, especially if capitalism is here for the long term. We talk about it much less than we should, in my view.
James 04.24.08 at 2:30 pm
the initial reason i made the comment i did was that i thought you’d actually kind of explained classist behavior within your post when you wrote that the standard understanding of the deficit model “holds the cultural resources of poor people to be inferior to those of wealthier and better educated people.”
well, i don’t think i’ve ever heard it defined either, now that you mention it, but my understanding of “classism” has always been something along the lines of concluding that poor people are poor because they’re stupid and one important piece of evidence for their stupidity is the poor performance of students in poor schools — and so that they bring their poverty upon themselves. rather than a more, say, generous reading — poor schools have fewer resources, fewer teachers, etc.; and/or that poorer parents frequently have less time to monitor their childrens’ schools (perhaps this is more the case in america than other countries with less insane labor laws?) — which then generate less potential for developing the skills necessary to perform well on whatever ‘objective’ determiners of success happen to be en vogue at the time. (as an aside, mark ames’ analysis, in ‘going postal’, of the flip side of such a phenomenon — where, because funding for schools is grounded in property value because of the taxes generated, and the bulk of family wealth even and especially in upper class areas is grounded in property value, and property value is profoundly linked to school performance [college placement, average gpa, etc.], the entire community is utterly dependent on the academic performance of its children — is brilliant.)
the problem, in the end, is capitalism, yes, but in a place like america, where everyone’s middle class, calling out classism seems important to me because it makes plain the economic disparities that cause the educational differences that become understood as moral or factical flaws of particular segments of the population.
classism distinct from racism, but, especially in america, also intertwined with it (thought perhaps slightly [i stress “slightly”] less so with sexism or other -isms?). being clear about the differences between classism and racism, i would think, can only make it easier to explain how and why they’re intertwined as densely as they are.
abb1 04.24.08 at 2:59 pm
I just want to add that asceticism, self-imposed poverty is not such a bad or crazy thing, I don’t think. And it’s not only nuns, monks, and saints who choose it. Though it’s nice to have a PC with internet connection.
abb1 04.24.08 at 3:19 pm
classism distinct from racism, but, especially in america, also intertwined with it
I don’t think the “especially in america” part is correct; look at that Italian poster a few posts below. It’s everywhere these days.
Tracy W 04.24.08 at 3:46 pm
Blame whoever you like. Please, really, do. If you want to blame me, please blame me, if it helps. Just in return, once you’ve done your blaming, can we start thinking about how to improve educational outcomes for poor students?
Given that some kids have some serious problems that are not within the ability of schools to solve, why do we still see so many differences in the performances of schools drawing on low-income populations? What do you make of the performance of Direct Instruction?
But time and time again, we pay more and we don’t get a better educated populace out. In Washington D.C., funding to public schools is over $24,000 per student, this is $10,000 more than the average per student spend at Washington DC private schools:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/04/AR2008040402921.html
And, before anyone mentions it, it’s not disabled kids. From the link:
Consider Florida’s McKay Scholarship program, which allows parents to pull their special-needs children out of the public schools and place them in private schools of their choosing. Parental satisfaction with McKay is stratospheric, the program serves twice as many children with disabilities as the D.C. public schools do, and the average scholarship offered in 2006-’07 was just $7,206. The biggest scholarship awarded was $21,907 — still less than the average per-pupil spending in D.C. public schools.
And yet you can still sit there, and assert, without feeling bothered to supply any supporting evidence at all, that “If you want a better educated populace, then pay for it.”
Yes, it’s hard that a kid with uninvolved parents pulls down a school’s performance on the NCLB.
But it’s a lot bloody harder on kids from poor backgrounds that so many schools apparently feel completely free to ignore evidence on what programmes work with kids from poor backgrounds, and people who are involved in schools feel free to pull arguments like “If you want a better educated populace, then pay for it” in the face of years of evidence against this.
newshutz 04.24.08 at 3:59 pm
The problems of the public school system are not the fault of culture, teachers, students, administrators, nor parents.
The problems of the public school system are almost entirely structural. The structure is socialist and top down command. There is little wonder that students needs are not being met. The wonder is that the schools are doing as well as they are.
It is time to toss out this failing 19th century means and refocus on the ends, a well educated populace.
Here’s a hint: Home schooling is not a problem to be solved, but a success to be studied.
robertdfeinman 04.24.08 at 5:57 pm
Tracy:
Try this:
http://www.ppinys.org/reports/jtf/educationspending.htm
Then try this:
http://heartland.temp.siteexecutive.com/pdf/23054.pdf
There is a very strong correlation between achievement and the amount of money devoted to it. Whatever your hangup with D.C. is, it’s not typical, for one thing it is the only reporting region which is actually just one urban, mostly low income, minority city.
You need to get out more.
Dan S. 04.24.08 at 7:28 pm
“Blame whoever you like. Please, really, do. If you want to blame me, please blame me, if it helps”
Hey, that was pretty funny.
“ Just in return, once you’ve done your blaming, can we start thinking about how to improve educational outcomes for poor students?”
So’s this, although less in a ha-ha way and more in a ‘huh, what alternate reality are you commenting from? It must be even worse than this one!’ way.
“In Washington D.C., funding to public schools is over $24,000 per student, this is $10,000 more than the average per student spend at Washington DC private schools:”
There are other issues here, but one thing to remember is that funding figures can be somewhat misleading. The average DC private school may be spending ~13,000/kid, but that doesn’t capture (nonschool) investment – both literal capital and harder-to-quantify advantages – being made per kid by parents, etc. Breakfast. Safe housing. Formal enrichment activities. Childraising practices that match those skills expected and utilized by schooling. Healthcare. In some cases – though this comes out of the unofficial out-of-teacher-pocket budget, if at all – clean (as in non-filthy) clothes.
One of the things with funding high-poverty schools is that a moment’s thought reveals that they’ll need to be funded rather better than high-privilege schools, if we’re going for some sort of rough equality of opportunity. Now, *obviously* that’s not the end of the story; what’s funded has to be both efficient and effective,to build as much as possible on children’s strengths and capabilities, and- given public attitudes towards funding poor/brown children’s education – any way to reasonably do more with less is very, very important. But past a certain point, it doesn’t matter what wonderful curricular or management practices one implements if the money isn’t there to adequately fund ’em.
Take the (US) military. It certainly may be misapplied, massive sums and countless lives squandered on unclear or absurd goals, and certainly there are examples of real fiscal mismanagement – but it’s generally understood that if you don’t adequately fund it, it doesn’t matter what exciting strategies and doctrines one applies.
Well, generally. I stand in awe of the Bush admin for coming as close to treating the military as crappy as inner-city schools as is probably possible in the U.S. context.
James 04.24.08 at 10:13 pm
well, obviously racism is hardly unique to america, and neither is the justification of racist attitudes through blindness to race-based class creation (some old british judgments of ireland come to mind). but in most of the rest of the world, there is at least a capacity to talk about class in a way that never seems possible in the states. the inability or unwillingness to be honest about class, from what i can tell, makes easier the jump to some kind of moral judgment of the race involved. (to be clear, i don’t want to imply that racism stems from classism. just that dishonesty about class makes racist attitudes appear more objectively determined.)
harry b 04.24.08 at 11:46 pm
james — that just sounds abolutely right (the last, non-parenthetical, sentence). Very helpful, thanks.
abb1 04.25.08 at 6:59 am
Nah, with all due respect, I have to disagree. Minor point, of course, and all this is mostly anecdotal, but you can talk to an average person in Paris, Milan or Moscow and – yes – they do understand capitalism better than most Americans, but as soon as you mention their underclass – immediately they think of Algerians, Albanians, or Tajiks. The correlation there is much too much to ignore and not to get suspicious that something’s wrong with that particular ethnicity, race or religion.
Plus, the marxist dogma itself, I understand, is quite resentful of its ‘lumpenproletariat’, the underclass – considers it a reactionary force. So what you have here is double resentment.
Tracy W 04.25.08 at 7:49 am
There is a very strong correlation between achievement and the amount of money devoted to it.
Honey, did you read the links you sent?
The first one is just a list of per capita spending with no information about educational achievement. The second, in the very first page of the executive summary, says:
The information, analysis, and measurements in this report confirm there is no evident correlation between pupil-to-teacher ratios, spending per pupil, and teacher salaries on the one hand, and educational achievement as measured by various standardized test scores, on the other.
The links you provided show absolutely no support for your statement that there is a strong correlation between achievement and the amount of money devoted to it.
Whatever my hangup about Washington D.C., at least I can read.
Tracy W 04.25.08 at 8:20 am
$24,000 per pupil spending in Washington D.C public schools, versus ~$14,000 per pupil at the average private school. For a class of 20 students, which seems low, that’s an extra $200,000 per year to deal with all their additional problems caused by poverty.
So what do you think of Direct Instruction – the curriculum programme that came out best in Project Followthrough in terms of educating kids from poor schools? (Project Followthrough was an effort to work out the most effective way of teaching kids in poor schools. Direct Instruction did best in terms of tests not merely of basic skills, but of cognitive skills, and affective skills (self-esteem and a sense of self-control).
http://www.projectpro.com/ICR/Research/DI/Summary.htm
Project Followthrough’s curriculums were tried on the schools you are talking about, the ones with students that didn’t have breakfast, and there’s gunfire in the streets, and no formal enrichment programmes at home. The developer of Direct Instruction started off with a curriculum with a first reading lesson that called for the kids to touch the letters as the teacher said them. Shortly he realised he needed a “zeroth” lesson for the kids who didn’t know what the word ‘touch’ meant. And this wasn’t kids who were foreign immigrants, these were kids with English as their only language, who were arriving at school not knowing the meaning of the word ‘touch’.
I agree that there is a minimum of money that is needed to support educational achievement. As far as I can tell though, schools in the western world are way above that, judging by the lack of correlation between educational spending and outcomes. And when I look at what happens in a programme like Direct Instruction, the lack of correlation between educational outcomes and spending makes sense. What happens in Direct Instruction is not any magic bullet, but is instead a lot of focus on details. For example lessons are written to remove ambiguities on the basis that if a teacher says something that can be intepreted two ways, Murphy’s law will kick in and half the kids in the class will pick the wrong intepretation, and get confused. No amount of money would, by itself, make a school strive to eliminate all the ambiguities from its teaching.
Dan S. 04.25.08 at 11:34 am
“No amount of money would, by itself, make a school strive to eliminate all the ambiguities from its teaching.”
Indeed. So it comes down to whether you think one of the major problems for schools serving impoverished and often mainstream-isolated populations is an excess of ambiguity in instruction.
“So what do you think of Direct Instruction”
I think (lowercase) direct instruction is one important tool in the teacher’s toolkit. (Upper case) Direct Instruction – well, I’ve never gotten around to reading all the research (maybe I should be spending less time blogcommenting?), but there certainly are some interesting aspects – the cycle of testing and refinement, for example – that if nothing else suggest useful methods.
(It’s unfortunate that through no fault of its own, DI implicitly plays into a different debate re: whether teaching, esp. teaching high poverty, often brown kids, should be a respected, highly skilled, semi-autonomous profession, or a low-status, low-skill, dependent trade. Would you like fries with that? Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes. Hello-my-name-is-Tammy-what-seems-to-be-the-problem.)
It’s odd that what might seem a somewhat dull and specialized subject – obscure curriculum details – tends to attract very strong feelings, sometimes even in people with no formal connection or training in the field. Whole Language vs. Phonics (back in the day), Everyday Math-style programs vs. traditional back to basics, etc., etc. – each one seems to attract random acolytes who push their newfound method as the One Best Way, often to the exclusion of all other considerations. Very odd.
Re: DC private schools: back in ’06, the Washington Post reported that “Tuition at some of the region’s elite private schools will exceed $26,000 this fall, ” Now, of course, we’re talking elite private schools – that’s certainly not the average tuition. (And if your factor in external spending and its equivalents, the amount being invested in these privileged tykes is truly remarkable.) For example, the article also cited a Catholic school where tuition was jumping from $4,900 to $5,390 – but of course, Catholic schools certainly don’t depend mainly on tuition, with much of the money coming from the arch/diocese, not to mention various non-generalizable costcutting strategies (in fact, that’s why catholic schools are in so much trouble in many places – a shrinking collection plate (through movement or loss of parish population), no longer staffed by nuns, etc.)
rm 04.25.08 at 12:49 pm
Harry, Rowling took the name “Hogwarts” from _Molesworth_. And the idea of selling daydreams to one’s classmates. I assume phrases like “wizard wheezes” are not unique to _Molesworth_ or _HP_.
I think a deficit model is when the observer decides it’s the poor people’s own damn fault. It’s the folk epistemology that governs our politics. Observing the obvious truth that poverty has bad consequences is not the same thing — so I, too, absolve thee.
Tracy W 04.25.08 at 2:26 pm
So it comes down to whether you think one of the major problems for schools serving impoverished and often mainstream-isolated populations is an excess of ambiguity in instruction.
Actually I would say that this is a problem for all schools. It’s just that kids from richer home backgrounds typically are better placed for dealing with poor instruction so their strong cognitive skills mask out poor instruction.
And it’s not just ambiguity, it’s a million and one details. Ambiguity is just one example. Another example – if you are going to use tests as feedback to improve your lesson plan you need valid and reliable tests. Which are difficult to write. I have serious doubts about the validity and reliability of many tests in the USA as the questions are not released publicly.
A second example – are inexperienced teachers supported by the administration in dealing with difficult student behaviours? You’d think this would be obvious, basic stuff, but I hear so many reports of even brand-new first year teachers being left to sink or swim!
As far as I can tell, teaching is really a profession because the details are extremely important and can make or break an enterprise, regardless of the big ideas animating it. Good quality education is really demanding of its practitioners.
It’s unfortunate that through no fault of its own, DI implicitly plays into a different debate re: whether teaching, esp. teaching high poverty, often brown kids, should be a respected, highly skilled, semi-autonomous profession, or a low-status, low-skill, dependent trade. Would you like fries with that? Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes. Hello-my-name-is-Tammy-what-seems-to-be-the-problem.
I know what you mean. Commentators seem to often confuse “reading a script” with low-skilled, low-status, totally ignoring that professional actors are certainly not low-skilled. And of course, what a teacher in a DI classroom is doing is even more complex than what an actor does, as the teacher is adjusting the lessons on the fly in response to feedback. And an actor on tour may perform the same play four times a week, while the teacher has a new lesson each day.
I’m from an engineering background, and so I’m used to the notion of minimmising our mental burdens, and turning as much work as possible into routine stuff, so we can focus our minds on the problems that haven’t been solved yet.
As for tutition at the elite public schools – I am rather skeptical about how much of the tuition at those elite schools buys a better education, as opposed to the social benefits of mixing with a lot of other rich kids. There’s been a bit of research done in NZ that suggested that they don’t provide much value-added educationally, but sadly I can’t find that online.
engels 04.25.08 at 2:34 pm
I don’t see why we should complain about, or try to get rid of, it, unless it is because it creates deficits
I’m not really clear what you mean in this post by ‘deficit’. But if you mean that there is some scale, on which poor people get a lower value than rich people, and you can’t see why we should complain about poverty unless it has this effect, then I don’t think this follows.
That’s because someone could believe that the existence of inequality damages all of us, rich and poor alike, and we would all benefit from its removal, without it necessarily being possible or desirable to make comparisons in the current state of affairs about who is worse off than who. This might involve a view of human flourishing that was somewhat at odds with the dominant assumptions of our culture.
Now I’m not saying I see things this way, I’m just pointing out that I think that your inference–that people who don’t see poverty as a ‘deficit’ can have no reason to care about poverty–seems too quick.
engels 04.25.08 at 3:00 pm
“One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.” Rousseau
engels 04.25.08 at 4:32 pm
To be more concrete, the example you give is that working people find that they have little influence over the middle class people who govern their families’ lives, eg. schoolteachers. But without getting into more detail about why this happens it seems premature to call this a ‘deficit’ in working class parents and their culture rather than middle class teachers and their culture…
engels 04.25.08 at 6:02 pm
Ok, having found out a bit more about what the ‘deficit model’ is supposed to be, I think there’s a much more straightforward response than #52.
I take it that it is supposed to refer to approaches to poverty that focus on the destructive habits developed by individuals. But then your claim that–
If you reject the idea that poverty, or inequality, creates deficits… I just don’t see what the moral reasons are for wanting to create a more equal, poverty-free, social environment.
seems very odd. I’d have thought there are plenty of obvious moral reasons why the levels of poverty and inequality we see today are unacceptable quite apart from any effect they have on the individual dispositions of the poor. Do you really not think so?
engels 04.25.08 at 6:09 pm
(But I’m getting the feeling I’ve probably missed the point somewhere…)
mpowell 04.25.08 at 6:18 pm
I find that it is very difficult to convince anyone with a brain that there is a consistent argument to be made that our society is fundamentally unfair for poor people, but that poverty does not introduce deficits. Now, many academics are highly trained in the intellectual jiu jitsu needed to credibly maintain this position, but it’s a much wider portion of the population that decides policy, so I don’t think this is a very fruitful approach.
Sure, you need to be worried about the wrong people co-opting your poverty creates deficits movement. But it seems really easy to convincingly argue the poverty creates deficits and those deficits are why things are unfair for poor people.
The trick is explaining to people why you can’t blame poor people for having a culture that doesn’t value education (or whatever deficit it is). B/c the default human instinct is to do so, even though when examined in the light of logic, it doesn’t make any sense.
The movement we need is one that convincingly argues and demonstrates that you can’t blame poor people for these deficits. I mean, really. If a poor black kid grows up in inner-city Baltimore and the life he experiences prevents him from valuing education… how is this his fault? I think once people start thinking more about this, they will eventually realize it doesn’t make sense. At least, that’s how I see it.
engels 04.25.08 at 6:36 pm
I find that it is very difficult to convince anyone with a brain that there is a consistent argument to be made that our society is fundamentally unfair for poor people, but that poverty does not introduce deficits.
It seems like you have just ignored most of the points made above.
1) If you mean deficit in a common sense way, then ‘unfairness’ appears to involve a ‘deficit’ (someone has got less than what he should have got) but you can have moral reasons for objecting to something that don’t involve fairness, contrary to Harry’s claim.
2) If you mean deficit in the sense in which objectors to the ‘deficit model’ appear to use it–roughly, a set of destructive personal dispositions–then it is perfectly consistent to argue both that poverty is unfair on the poor and that it does not create ‘deficits’.
3) Opponents of the ‘deficit model’ do not in fact argue this, but that such ‘deficits’ are over-emphasised.
engels 04.25.08 at 6:45 pm
contrary to Harry’s claim
s/b ‘what Harry seems to assume’, cf. #52
engels 04.25.08 at 8:11 pm
Okay, looking at it again I see that my point about ‘deficits’ in its ordinary meaning has nothing to do with what you are discussing here so please just ignore that. The other points stand, though, in particular I will just re-iterate my puzzlement at this:
I don’t see why we should complain about, or try to get rid [poverty], unless it is because it creates deficits [ie. destructive habits, especially culturally mediated ones]
and emphasise that I think people on the Left, especially in the US, have very good reasons for being wary of such ‘deficit’ arguments.
engels 04.27.08 at 2:58 am
Hmmm ‘what Harry seems to assume’ — I don’t actually think that Harry does assume this. I should have just said I really don’t understand the last part of this post and left it at that.
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